[An eloquent 1982 ad cherishes local editorial freedom]
Dropping USA Today's national and world news pages into Gannett's community papers is the next step in the elimination of local editorial control -- one many readers will greet with suspicion and justifible alarm. Working in the field for 20 years, I often heard residents speak about fears giant Gannett Co. was consolidating media power at the expense of local interests.
Their biggest fear focused on opinion: that Corporate would dictate editorials favoring hot-button issues like candidate endorsements, gun control and abortion. That doesn't yet appear to be part of the mission of ContentOne, the news gathering and distribution system launched in late 2008, and now run by former chief publicist Tara Connell.
But it's certainly a risk as ContentOne consolidates editing decisions over news at a small number of hubs, including the biggest of all: Corporate in McLean, Va. As I wrote last year, it's an ominous shift in a century-old policy laid down by co-founder Frank Gannett (left). He mandated local autonomy over news coverage, from school boards to presidential inaugurations, the company's history on Corporate's website says: "It was his belief that a newspaper best serves its city if its publisher, editor and all its employees are locally oriented and understand the city and its people."His view was expressed eloquently in 1982, when Gannett published a full-page advertisement in Black Enterprise magazine under the headline, "Freedom Begins at Home." It says: "As a matter of principle, Gannett has no single voice. That principle is freedom. And that freedom is rooted in the First Amendment. Each Gannett voice is free to express its own opinions, free to serve its own community, free to meet its own professional responsibilities, free to speak as its own local professional managers see fit."
Now, contrast that with Corporate's ContentOne promise in the slick new annual shareholders report. In the cold language of an enterprise that's now an international media and marketing solutions company, top management says it will:"continue the development and enhancement of the ContentOne initiative, through which it expects to fundamentally change the way content is gathered, shared and sold. ContentOne's focus is to reduce duplication of effort in developing and gathering content and enhancing the sharing of content across the company. A key objective is to view content as a product, with usefulness and value beyond its inclusion in the company's newspapers, television broadcasts and websites. ContentOne builds on the Information Center initiative by creating a national focal point that will serve all of the company's businesses."
Frank Gannett was a shrewd, scowling businessman, to be sure, a political animal who once sought to occupy the White House. But even Gannett sounded like he had a heart.
[Image: today's USAT, Newseum]
1. News 2000
ReplyDelete2. Real Life, Real News
3. The Information Center
4. ContentOne
What am I missing?
5. Stock Tank and Company Rape by Senior Execs.
ReplyDeleteAn oldie, but a goodie: How does the Moments of Life aspect enter into the reporting?
ReplyDeleteWasn't there something about Circles of Life? And don't forget the crapass diversity initiatives, where we had to make lists of minority contacts in the city and use them for stories, whether there was a link or not. I know a reporter whose black male contact told him to stop calling for quotes, since he knew full well what was going on and it incensed him.
ReplyDeleteThe community newspapers lost their autonomy when they agreed to close their printing plants and move to regional plants. As Moon said before he left, Dubow is out to destroy the community newspapers. This is suicidal, since according to internal docs. Jim posted a few years ago, these are truly profitable enterprises. We are on a different course now than Gannett laid out, and this is no longer a newspaper company but a money-making operation where the execs are pocketing the lion's share. If it turns out to be a huge mistake to consolidate and centralize, there is no turning back. Once you break the egg, you can't put it back together again.
ReplyDeleteSo the days of local editorial control are gone. Maybe Dubow is laying plans like Gannett once contemplated of running for president.
Ha! The diversity mandate. That was the biggest joke of all, albeit a sad one. I never thought I'd see the day when a reporter would select a source on the basis of his/her skin color.
ReplyDeleteAnd that wasn't easy when, if you were a municipal reporter, your beat was 98 percent white!
It was my experience that more times than not the copy desk would cut the so-called minority out of the story.
Simply one of a series of half-baked ideas hatched by overpaid suits and skirts in corporate's cocoon.
Too bad they and news execs in virtually every other big media company ignored the Internet until it passed them by.
Barf from the past (who writes this garbage):
ReplyDelete"But in a profoundly multicultural society such as ours, the key Moments of Life are as bountiful and diverse as the people who live, work, go to school and raise families in the communities served by Gannett newspapers. Under Real Life, Real News, it is essential that Gannett journalists be aware of all the diverse cultures in their own communities and also of the Moments of Life that matter most within those cultures."
9:59 a.m. Ha indeed. The reporter I mentioned had to cover an annual old car show in rural Wisconsin. The editors told him to get the aforementioned diversity quotes. Um, this is rural Wisconsin and there ain't too many people of color living in the hinterlands. They even sent him back out to get the damn quotes.
ReplyDeleteThat was the last straw. He quit on the spot and is now freelancing and editor of a monthly alternative entertainment tab that is quite successful.
Inserting or running USA Today nation/world content will further genericize the newspapers to their detriment and demise. Look all around us: The most successful Web sites and magazines cater to vertical or niche subjects/audiences. Broad and bland are out. Deep focus is in. If anything, newspapers should focus entirely on local content and leave the nation/world stuff to those who are really good at getting it.
ReplyDeleteThese experiments don't work. Copley newspapers tried this a decade ago, and it was a disaster. Copley also expected to sell their page-ready copy to other papers outside the chain, but that didn't work out, either. And we see what happened to Copley.
ReplyDeleteWow! This is a major post that speaks to the heart of the future of journalism, at least at Gannett. This is very scary stuff. Why not just distribute USA TODAY with a local wrap and some ad inserts? You could run a newsroom with six people, maybe five, or fewer, er, uh oh.
ReplyDeleteYou got it, 6:20. You can't break into these pages, so what do you do with a late-breaking story say on Russia agreeing with the U.S. on nuclear weapons reductions as happened this week. Do you as the local editor spike the late-breaking development, do you spike the page or do you run two stories. I think the idea is spike the late-breaking development and let the ContentOne pagegs cover it tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteAlso since this page -- or soon to be these pages -- are for everyone, they will have a very early deadline. I think this clearly lends itself to running timeless feature stories.
In fairness to Tara and her crew, it should be noted for many of these papers I've seen, it will provide more local and world news than they have run in many years.
I meant national and world news, not local and world. Local news will be covered by the regional centers.
ReplyDeleteHey Jim:
ReplyDelete5) Local ContentNone
Some are eager to dump on Real Life/Real News and mainstreaming. Those ideas were innovative and reminded us of what we *should* be doing. Now look at some Gannett front pages in Newseum every day. Wire. More wire. Crime. Sentencings. Those are resource-stressed newsrooms that have little non-crime or wire to run on the front page.
ReplyDeleteLet's see. Force the local papers to take USA Today-produced pages to justify Content One's existence and cut costs. Annoy people who want local news, so they cancel the local paper. Annoy people who take USA Today' they can get the gist in the local paper, so they cancel. It's a lose-lose, and the clowns get bigger bonuses.
ReplyDelete1:32, Real Life/Real News and mainstreaming were not innovative ideas. They were just corporate mandates thought up by some suits who needed to come up with something to justify their salaries.
ReplyDeletePeople at my paper had no clue what RL/RN was supposed to be, and from what it was described as, it was stuff that we already were doing. overing a high school graduation was considered a 'Moment of Life'. Well, duh. That's what we did for years and years without giving it some fancy nickname. It's called .. News.
Mainstreaming was a poor idea, especially for those papers that were in a predominately white area. It was pounded into us (justifiably, I might add), that we needed to avoid conflicts of interest because we didn't want the public to question our credibility. Yet, we sacrificed our credibility by playing favorites with sources on the basis of their skin color and placing stories in the paper for the purpose of satisfying corporate instead of for our readers' benefit.
If corporate would have spent more time coming up with ideas on incorporating the Web (which they finally did with the 'Information Center' several years too late), instead of silly ideas like RL/RN and counting how many minorities appear in the paper, perhaps Gannett and their employees might be all a little better off.
I recall Westchester editors - the ones who had real jobs and did real work - spending hours highlighting examples of mainstreaming and real people/real news in the daily paper so they could be sent to corporate.
ReplyDeleteWhat a waste of time!
Instead of working with reporters, planning projects, etc., these editors had to spend their time entering what was more or less a corporate sweepstakes.
And there was one year when, I swear, you would have thought every high school graduate was black or Asian. Those were the only grads the photographers shot because they had their orders, too!